ESSAY
Saved by the Button
Furriers have to live, too," said my mother when, in the midst of the Depression, she bought a long leopard coat. She wore it everywhere. Its hem got ragged and muddy. The furrier shortened it into a jacket, and later into a hat, and then a muff, and then a pillow, and finally a button.
The leopard, transformed again and again, became a kind of mascot. In a brief essay I told its beast-to-button history. Smithsonian magazine liked the piece, bought it, published it in its April 2002 issue. And that was comfortably that.
But no. Smithsonian received some fan mail. It also received four letters pointing out that the story closely resembled a Jewish fable about a thrifty tailor who recycled his coat. The correspondents worried that what claimed to be biography was fiction — borrowed fiction.
Smithsonian's editors asked me to compose a response. I wrote: "I'm delighted to learn that my mother [was] recapitulating an old tale" — a lie: I would have preferred to remain in the dark. I wrote: "I'm full of bad habits, but plagiarizing isn't one of them" — the truth.
And that, somewhat less comfortably, was that.
But no. One of the letter-writers was, and is, a columnist for the Jewish Forward. On April 5, without waiting for the reply from Smithsonian — without bothering to telephone me with a How's by you? — he printed a stronger version of his complaint: a frank accusation of literary theft.
The Forward for decades was an influential daily paper published in Yiddish, a mainstay of Jewish immigrant life. These days it is published once a week, in English. (There are Yiddish and Russian weekly Forwards, too.) Less influential than in its heyday, it is still respectable and interesting.
My own grandmother's rag — and it had called me a crook.
Did I now understand what it felt like to be Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly accused of treason, exiled to Devil's Island?
Well, no. To claim kinship with him would be theft of another kind: assumption of grand importance.
But I do know what it feels like to be unjustly accused of plagiarism. It feels like being splattered, head to toe, with mud. It unsettles the mind. Did my mother really have a leopard coat? I wondered. Did I really have a mother?
Fortunately there was something I was certain I had — the button.
I wrote to the columnist and his editor, offering to bring the button to their New York offices. Stay home, they insisted; just send us a photograph of the thing. I sent the button's photograph; they published it; the columnist ran a retraction, and, in a burst of largess (a word stolen from the French), printed a portion of my leopard reminiscence.
So he gave the tale a new incarnation, albeit in a shortened version. And that is finally that — except for the bit of mud still clinging to the hem of my reputation.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
